📚 Money lessons

Brazil's Senate approved a bill last Wednesday that would place personal finance on the syllabus of every primary and secondary school in the country. The timing carries its own lesson: lawmakers voted to teach the next generation how to handle money in the same year a record share of the current one stopped paying its bills.

The proposal aims to embed financial education as a "cross-cutting" theme, meaning teachers would fold concepts of budgeting, saving, and debt into existing subjects, from math to geography, rather than creating a standalone class. Each school keeps the autonomy to decide how. Because senators reworked the text, it now returns to the lower house for a final vote before it can reach President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's desk.

Financial education already appears in the national curriculum framework, where it has technically been mandatory since 2017. What the bill does is…

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